概率性艾伦代数(PAA)提出,为时间关系提供概率性扩展
PAA: The Probabilistic Allen Algebra: A Generative and Complete Probabilistic Extension of Allen's Interval Relations
这篇论文提出了一个很酷的模型,叫PAA,专门处理时间关系中的不确定性,比如‘大约在...期间’这种模糊的时间描述,比传统方法更灵活。
这篇论文提出了一种名为PAA的概率性艾伦代数,它是对传统艾伦时间关系的扩展。PAA通过使用高斯分布来描述时间点和区间,能够处理时间信息中的不确定性。例如,它可以将"大约在...期间"这样的模糊表述转化为概率模型。该模型将时间点视为高斯分布,区间有高斯中点和截断高斯持续时间,所有关系都在一个共同的概率空间中通过边界排序来定义。通过引入容差带,接触关系(如开始、结束)获得了正的概率测度。当容差趋近于零时,PAA可以恢复到传统的艾伦关系。该工作已作为开源的Python包发布。
PAA: The Probabilistic Allen Algebra: A Generative and Complete Probabilistic Extension of Allen's Interval Relations
Allen's interval algebra is a qualitative calculus for temporal relations, but its thirteen base relations are crisp predicates over exact interval boundaries. This is inadequate for temporal information from language, perception, databases, or uncertain histories, where times, durations, and boundaries are uncertain and expressions such as "just before" or "roughly during" have graded meaning. We develop the probabilistic Allen algebra (PAA): a generative and complete extension in which relation probabilities are derived from distributions over interval boundaries rather than assigned as scores. Time points are Gaussian; intervals have Gaussian midpoints and truncated-Gaussian durations. Every relation is a boundary-ordering predicate in one common probability space: point-point relations reduce to error functions, and point-interval and interval-interval relations to multivariate Gaussian orthant probabilities induced by linear inequalities. Contact relations (meets, starts, finishes, equals) receive positive measure through a tolerance band, and under a single tolerance the thirteen relations form a true partition that recovers crisp Allen as the tolerance vanishes. The construction derives Allen's taxonomy rather than positing it: coarse predicates such as precedence, overlap, and containment are unions of leaves whose probabilities are leaf sums, and this hierarchy is preserved as intervals collapse to points and thirteen relations reduce to five and then three. Each relation further decomposes into correlation-aware temporal primitives in the spirit of CIDOC CRM. The algebra is scale-invariant and separates graded expressions such as "shortly before" from contact relations. All results are Monte-Carlo validated and shipped as an open, tested Python package.